Patriots (56 page)

George Washington had reached Brooklyn before the battle began. Noticeably shaken, he watched the slaughter below him.
One soldier overheard him murmur,
“Good God! What brave fellows I must lose this day!”

Along the wooded defenses, Lord Stirling had no choice but to fight on, even as the British trap was tightening around him. For nearly four hours, Stirling’s men fought in close ranks. The British remained content to shell his position while their allies hurried around to cut off his retreat. After one last desperate charge, Stirling sent his men retreating through the deep marshes around Gowanus Creek. Many were shot as they slogged through the pond, and a dozen weak swimmers drowned in its depths. Stirling himself took two hundred and seventy Maryland soldiers and turned to confront Cornwallis. Men said afterward that he had fought like a wolf. But Stirling was as rigid about the rules of war as the British had been a year before. Instead of letting his men break ranks and take advantage of the woods and fences—the way the British and Germans had begun to do—he held them in a tight formation on exposed ground. Five times his band of Americans tried to cut through the British to safety in Brooklyn. Ten of them succeeded. The rest were killed or taken prisoner by the Germans closing in on them. Lord Stirling was reported missing. Then a dispatch reached George Washington that John Sullivan was lost as well.

Throughout the remainder of the afternoon, Washington waited at the Brooklyn fort while the few survivors of the frontline defense straggled back to safety. The British had been ordered not to storm the Heights. General Howe intended to take the hills in good time with an orderly strategy that would hold British casualties to what he termed “a very cheap rate.” But Henry Clinton was delighted that his tactic had succeeded beyond his expectations. When he saw the Americans fleeing in panic, he couldn’t bring himself to stop his men. Some of Clinton’s assault columns chased the Americans right to their own trenches on the Heights.

Behind their earthworks, the Americans milled about. Their officers were missing, many in their ranks were dead or held prisoner in the woods below. George Washington tried to restore their spirit, shouting to them to remember what they were fighting for. Some troops obeyed and strengthened their defenses, particularly toward the Jamaica road. But when the British regrouped and charged, as they would, the American Army would be broken and the rebellion over.

Only one man could save them, and it was not the commander in chief. From a hilltop, William Howe looked out over the day’s success and called on his grenadiers to halt. “Enough has been done for one day,” he said. His troops hardly agreed. Their blood was running hot from the hours of fighting, and they wanted to charge on and crush the enemy. Howe had to issue his order repeatedly before he could convince them to stop in midvictory.

—

General Washington slept fitfully that night. He had assumed at first that Howe was only pausing to regroup and would finish the battle in the late afternoon. But as the hours stretched on toward night, Washington’s men became less sure that this was America’s last day of independence. His marksmen kept a steady barrage pouring down on the British camp, and by midnight it seemed clear that this time there was no deception. Howe’s army had taken to its tents.

There were new fears of a British attack at dawn, and Washington was back at his post by 4
A.M.
He had decided that he could draw only limited reserves from New York. Though Howe had committed a large part of his army to Long Island, he might still be planning an attack against the town. Washington felt he must keep men there to repel it. The morning passed. Howe remained silent.

A piercing rain began on the Heights, and Washington’s men, who had no tents, stood in their muddy trenches waist deep in water. They couldn’t cook the pickled pork that was their only food. Worse, the rain was soaking their powder and clogging their muskets. If Howe sent his Hessians to advance now, the Americans would have no protection against their bayonets.

Washington couldn’t depend forever on Howe’s inertia. Throughout the day he was developing a plan, which he kept secret even from his aides-de-camp. When he found a moment to send a report to the Congress in Philadelphia, he didn’t mention his hope for recovering from an unquestioned defeat. Washington told the delegates that his army was almost broken. After the two nights and a day since the battle had ended, he still could not estimate American casualties, and both General Sullivan and Lord Stirling were missing.

Later that afternoon, it was still raining when Washington called his seven generals to a council of war at the country house
of Philip Livingston, one of New York’s delegates to the Congress. Everyone understood how perilous their situation was. Washington’s strategy had left them with fewer than ten thousand weary and disheartened men boxed into a narrow space about two miles square. Ahead were twice that number of British and German soldiers ready to finish off the job, and to the rear was the East River, a barrier one mile wide. Reports had arrived that Lord Stirling had surrendered to General von Heister and that General Sullivan had been caught in a cornfield and taken to a ship of Admiral Howe’s fleet. The longer Washington and his staff delayed, the nearer they came to the same fate.

—

William Howe saw conditions the same way. The Americans were doomed. He would now bring up his cannon, his scaling ladders and the other tools his artillery would use to launch a methodical siege. His careful approach had saved fifteen hundred British lives. That was reason enough to forgo a premature rushing of an entrenched position. His brother’s fleet was nearby to guarantee that Washington and his men would stay bottled up.

Throughout two rainy days, the British repaired the damage from the fighting on August 27. Then, on the morning of the thirtieth, Howe sent out a patrol. American sniping had continued throughout the night, and Howe wanted to know why there was now a lull in the fire.

The British scouts came back with an incredible answer. During the night, George Washington had disappeared with all of the American Army.

New York patriots pulling down the statue of George III

PRIVATE COLLECTION

I
T WAS
little consolation for George Washington, but, in its way, his retreat had been as skilled as the British attack. From the time his general staff approved the evacuation, he had moved with absolute secrecy. His troops were told only that the wounded men would be sent back across the river to Manhattan that night. Washington ordered every available vessel brought to the shore behind him, and swarms of barges, sailboats and punts collected there. Many
of the sailors were fishermen from Marblehead, Massachusetts. By 10
P.M.
, Washington was ready to begin. Instead of facing the night attack they had been dreading, the American soldiers were called from their positions in the trenches. Their lines were so tightly organized that no gaps could be spotted by the British sentries. Campfires were kept burning while regiment after regiment left their stations and were replaced by the men behind them. Washington had
gone ahead to the river and was supervising the loading of the troops.

For three nights the men had barely slept, and they were past fatigue. The embarkation had begun smoothly, but when the men realized that they were being shipped out they were soon jostling and fighting for places in the first boats. Washington did his best to keep order, but frightened men at the back were trying to trample over the front ranks.

The noise and confusion awakened a woman who lived near the ferry point. She had no reason to support the rebels. Neighbors had reported her for still drinking English tea, and American soldiers had fired on her house. Now she sent a black servant to alert the British to the evacuation. The man worked his way through the lines until he came upon a German officer, but the German spoke no English and arrested the servant.

Even though soldiers were panicking along the shore, the rotation of troops through the lines facing the British had gone as ordered. Then one of Washington’s aides made a near-fatal mistake. At 2
A.M.
Washington was watching impatiently over the loadings when he was surprised to see Colonel Israel Hand riding toward the ferry. He had instructed Hand and his Pennsylvania troops to hold the American defenses to the very end.

Washington called to him through the darkness. “Isn’t that Colonel Hand? You of all officers! I thought you would never abandon your post!”

Hand assured him that he had left only under orders from his immediate commander, General Thomas Mifflin.

“Impossible!” Washington said. Hand was trying to convince him when General Mifflin rode up and asked what was the matter.

Washington rounded on him. “Good God, General Mifflin! I’m afraid you have ruined us by so unseasonably withdrawing the troops from the lines.”

Mifflin had slept no more than George Washington. He said angrily, “I did it by your order.”

Washington said it couldn’t be true.

“By God, I did!” Mifflin insisted. “Did Scammell act as aide-de-camp for the day or did he not?”

Washington acknowledged that Alexander Scammell had held that post.

“Then,” said Mifflin, “I had orders through him.”

Washington immediately became conciliatory. It had been a dreadful mistake, he said, but, with all of the confusion on the riverbank, if the British discovered that the front lines had been abandoned they could annihilate them. The common danger cooled tempers on both sides, and Colonel Hand led his men back to the trenches. They were reluctant, but they moved quickly and quietly, and the British didn’t profit from the blunder.

As the night was ending, the last regiments who were left behind in the American lines became increasingly nervous. Then, just as dawn might have exposed their weakness, heavy billows of fog rose off the water and hid them in mist. The men blessed a cover so thick they couldn’t see six yards in front of them. The fog persisted as they got their orders to head for the ferry. The last soldiers waiting to cross had one final scare: the boats had not returned from an earlier trip, and men huddled in the fog along the shore, fretting until they could be rowed to safety. General Washington waited with them and crossed with his gray charger in one of the last boats. He had left behind only a few old cannon sunk deep in mud.

—

When Washington reviewed the lessons of Long Island, he didn’t dwell on the way he had overlooked the Jamaica road. And on the British side, General Howe’s account of the triumphant battle filled three and a half columns in the London newspapers, while Washington’s escape rated barely half a paragraph. Since Lord North’s Ministry did not learn immediately about Howe’s miscalculations and delay, George III rewarded Howe with a knighthood.

Washington knew he couldn’t expect honorary degrees or gold medals this time. In his defense, he reminded one New York legislator that he had gone without sleep for forty-eight hours. Privately, he complained about the drawbacks in trying to fight a war with a militia rather than a standing army. Militia recruits had signed up for such short service that Washington’s troops were usually preparing to go home before they had been properly trained. He had lost fifteen hundred men in combat on Long Island, and others were leaving the cause every day because they had crops to harvest or because they had been stricken with an illness their skeptical comrades called “cannon fever.” The Connecticut militia dropped abruptly from eight thousand men to two thousand. Disembarking
from the boats, Washington’s survivors from Brooklyn limped into the town of New York sick, emaciated and, according to the Tories near their camp, smelling like pigs.

The disaster had also revealed the shortcomings of America’s commander in chief. One of Lord Stirling’s colonels wrote to a member of the Congress that he revered Washington, that the troops would always remember his patience and fortitude, but Washington had brought much of the calamity on himself. The colonel ended by reporting that officers and men were murmuring, “
Would to Heaven General Lee were here!

Washington hoped to recuperate from his losses by sending spies to find out where Sir William Howe would strike next. He was willing to spend lavishly for information, but money wasn’t the motive for one of his first volunteers. Nathan Hale of Connecticut was twenty-one, a schoolteacher educated at Yale who had become a captain in a ranger company. Hale was also a poet, an expert at checkers and a football player with a powerful kick. So far he had not seen action, and although the penalty for spying was death, he wanted to serve his country. Posing as a schoolmaster in his civilian clothes, Hale made his way to Long Island and slipped behind the British defenses.

—

Soon after the American defeat, the Congress was distracted from General Washington’s shortcomings by a dilemma that faced the delegates unexpectedly. Lord Stirling and General Sullivan had been passing the time more comfortably in captivity aboard Admiral Howe’s flagship, the
Eagle
, than they would have done at Washington’s side. The admiral, who was also a British lord, had decided that John Sullivan was probably less obdurate than his commander in chief. He had convinced Sullivan that they could end the war now and that the Parliament would ratify any treaty Howe made. The admiral had denounced the war as senseless and said that Britain must surrender all rights to tax the colonies. That at least was what Sullivan had thought the admiral was saying. After some hesitation, Sullivan had agreed to carry Howe’s peace overtures to the Congress. Carrying a pass to get him through the British lines, Sullivan had reached New York on his way to Philadelphia hours before Washington completed his evacuation from Brooklyn.